The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice by Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice by Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh Helen Makhdoumian Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh. The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice. Stanford UP, 2019. 402 p. The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice (2019) is in part the narrative of Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, who defies an implied expectation in the academy: that an art historian’s role is not to intervene in a legal matter involving a museum or controversies surrounding art. Aware of precisely this reaction to her 2010 op-ed about the litigation of the Zeytun Gospels, Watenpaugh frames the volume with a Prologue and an Epilogue that articulate why she retraced the steps of this manuscript illuminated by Toros Roslin, a renowned artist of medieval Armenian art. That history includes how the Canon Tables were separated from what she calls the mother manuscript housed in the Mesrob Mashtots Institute for Ancient Manuscripts (known as the Matenadaran) in Yerevan, Armenia and how these separated folios entered The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Zeytun Gospels made headlines in June 2010 when the Western Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America brought a lawsuit against the museum and accused it of holding a sacred object vandalized and plundered during the Armenian Genocide. The Missing Pages, then, also provides an overview of the court case proceedings, the settlement, and its implications for provenance, reparations, and the adjudication of crimes against cultural heritage. Each chapter of the main text focuses on a stop on the seven-century long journey taken by the Zeytun Gospels: Hromkla, Zeytun, Marash, Aleppo, New York, Yerevan, and Los Angeles. Beyond tracing this medieval manuscript’s modern history, Watenpaugh seeks to illustrate the “webs of relationships, emotions, deeds and misdeeds, and pious, sacrilegious, rapacious, and creative acts that unfolded around it” (47). One way the author achieves this is by introducing each chapter with a brief narrative set in the moment that the manuscript rested in that particular location. To frame the chapter on the origins of the manuscript, for instance, Watenpaugh imagines for readers a scene in [End Page 138] which Roslin, described as a scribe hunched over his work, writes the colophon in the scriptorium in Hromkla in 1256 and signs his name. Watenpaugh deftly synthesizes archival documents, her own fieldwork in the present, critical scholarship, and documents in legal proceedings to introduce readers to a transnational network of individuals involved in safeguarding the manuscript. The Missing Pages, however, is more than just the journey of the author as she retraces the steps of the Zeytun Gospels. It is also more than just the “biography of a manuscript that is at once art, sacred object, and cultural heritage,” as the blurb on the front book flap indicates. That is, Watenpaugh proffers a useful concept in the study of materiality when it comes to questions of trauma and memory: survivor objects. Survivor objects “symbolize violence but also survival and resilience” (40). The Zeytun Gospels exemplify the work of survivor objects insofar as the pages shaped the way that Armenians in the wake of genocide and exile reconstructed their identities. Furthermore, Watenpaugh argues that this illuminated manuscript “experienced the Armenian Genocide and bears the mark of its violence” (40). The author develops this argument by referencing the words of an Armenian bishop who visited Armenian refugee communities in Syria and Lebanon in 1923. Watenpaugh asserts that the bishop viewed the thousands of orphans he met and the illuminated manuscripts he came across as both survivors. He also drew parallels between the destruction of the Armenian community with the destruction of art. Informed by the writings of contemporaneous witnesses who conceived of cultural objects as witnesses to devastation and resilience, Watenpaugh goes on to demonstrate that critical study of survivor objects like the Zeytun Gospels can offer a more holistic understanding about the issues of cultural heritage and the role of the cultural objects’ caretakers and viewers. Beyond theorizing survivor objects and applying this rubric to the study of a work of art caught in circumstances of collective trauma and...